It’s not swine flu

I’ve been under the weather the last few days, stricken with a cold that could be a mild dose of seasonal flu (the term “flu” is quite subjective, don’t you think? – one man’s or woman’s flu is another’s heavy cold, which I suspect is my case). But with the Media bashing on about a “swine flu pandemic” my paranoia levels have been creeping up.
Usually I return to work if I’m half well (as someone one said to me, if I’m fit enough to walk down the garden if there was a pot of gold sitting there, then I’m fit enough to go to work), but I’ve been worried about contagion, passing on my germs to my colleagues – just in case it is a mild dose of pig-fluenza and not just a cold.
And that paranoia has stretched to family too; I’ve been sat as far away as I can from Baby Daniel, despite the lure of cute baby noises and laughter. (He’s at that ten week-old age where he craves attention and gets all squeaky when he can’t see you.)
But it has got me out of nappy changing, so every cloud…

Anyway, call it a fear if you like, but while I’m not afraid of swine flu, I am afraid of Daniel getting it, and Sarah too (though with Sarah it’s more of a selfish thing – Sarah’s healthy enough to keep it at bay, but I would need to take time off work if she came down with it - if that happened I’d be looking after the baby in her absence).

As for my immediate fear... Well, for the first two days I honestly thought I had a mild dose, not strong enough to incapacitate me, but strong enough to make me lethargic and coldy. As the effects wore off, I was relieved but I kept that fear alive for personal reasons and I’ve now added that feeling of paranoia and denial to The Black Hours, a story that is more about paranoia of plague than it should be about politics (though admittedly, the first drafts were the other way around)...

...It might surprise some of you that I’m still tinkering with The Black Hours, but while I agree that nothing is wasted, in this case I want to see where I went wrong and to see if it is salvageable. And The Black Hours is, salvageable that is. It just missed out, and with a few tweaks I'm certain this could be the first "Frank Wallace" novel in print. I could be wrong, but one attempt is not enough to dissuade me.
I won’t have finished my tinkering by the time I start the third Secret War book, but I’ll have left myself a minor project to complete once I’ve laid The Fortress of Black Glass to rest. Hopefully I will have added enough fear in The Black Hours to make it work, to force the reader’s heart to beat faster. After all The Black Hours was meant to be a story about fear, about the end of the familiar in Victorian society. Yet somehow down the line it became more a James Bond thriller and less about the fear. After reading the last draft, Dave Budd mentioned that my plague “was not scary enough”, that “real” people weren’t being endangered.
Now they are and The Black Hours has become more of a tragedy than a straight forward adventure thriller; a catastrophe affecting not just the extras but the main characters too.

So I guess a recent bout of paranoia can do wonders for writing apocalyptic novels…

…And no, I’m certain I don’t have swine-flu.

How certain?
Oh, about 80-20.

(Or perhaps, 70-30…)